


Five Times Life Fucked Dan Ashcroft Over (and one time it smooched him nicely)

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, the idiots are winning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:00:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3132056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not being allowed to go to the library for two weeks for hurtling his sister across the room and throwing books at all of her friends while his willy hung out of his pyjamas was a cruel and unusual punishment, even for his cruel and unusual parents, but at least life couldn't possibly get any worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Life Fucked Dan Ashcroft Over (and one time it smooched him nicely)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cambusmore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/gifts).



**( 1983 )**

Dan wanted to paint his bedroom walls black - _like my soul_ he informed his parents, without bothering to douse the words in irony first because he was fifteen - but that sort of thing wasn't really done in Leeds so they ended up a colour called _Heathcliff's Castle_ instead, which was basically beige but at least had a vague literary pretension going for it. It was easier to lie there on his bed having a moody wank in the early days of blank walls and lingering paint fumes. Things got slightly more complex when he started sticking posters up (Allen Ginsberg looked as though he approved, but accidentally catching Vonnegut's eye mid-session was as awkward as fuck so Dan sellotaped Rebecca De Mornay up next to him just to be safe), then downright dangerous as soon as Claire got mildly less hateable than before and actually made some friends. They were horrible little shriek-machines who seemed not to have homes of their own and spent way too much time in the bedroom next door to Dan's, howling about ponies or whatever it was that thirteen-year-old girls did when there were more of two of them in a small enclosed space. The walls were thin, he could hear the little twerps wittering without end, ruining everything. He did his private business with headphones on for a while but there were too many close calls with parents too stupid to knock on a closed door, so then he spent several weeks training himself to block them out with a martial arts level of discipline and self-control, a sort of teenage cock meditation, a carefully exacted out of body experience in which the only parts of his body he was out of were his ears.

It all seemed to work fine until the night of the sleepover when his bedroom door clattered open and he gasped in shock, actually gasped in shock like someone from a shit novel, somehow managed to swallow air and choke on it as though it had substance so he came up burping and heaving and leaking from the eyes, fighting for breath as five life-size Pippa dolls crowded into his bedroom, all pigtails and grins and bright unjaded eyes fuck he hated them fucking fuck fuck die fuck.

"I'm telling Mum!" he yelled by accident when he meant to say something brilliant and cutting, aware even as it dropped from his traitorous mouth that poster-Vonnegut's eyes seemed more and more disappointed in him by the day.

Claire leapt on him then, getting him in a headlock and scuffing her knuckles hard into the top of his head, mimicking _I'm telling Muuuum_ in the whiniest of voices that obviously sounded nothing at all like him - then suddenly the horror of it all walloped him like a train in the guts and he wished frantically that there'd been enough in that suffocating swallow of air to put him out of his misery for good because if Claire moved only a couple of inches forward she'd be sitting right on something no sister should ever ever be within a light year of ever oh god.

"We just wanna paint your nails!" one of the other little devils said, flicking on his bedroom light like a cop-film interrogator while another advanced on him menacingly with a bottle of something cerise and sparkly and the other two went to lift the blanket to find his hands.

Not being allowed to go to the library for two weeks for hurtling his sister across the room and throwing books at all of her friends while his willy hung out of his pyjamas was a cruel and unusual punishment, even for his cruel and unusual parents, but at least life couldn't possibly get any worse.

* * *

**( 1999 )**

"I'm gonna change my name," Rufus said, beaming around the table already as if that statement on its own deserved a round of applause and an approving pat on the arse. "Seymour Kuntz."

Dan stared at him with a loathing that sloshed in his stomach like indigestion while everyone else chortled, as though nothing in the world had ever been more witty or original than a fucking stupid pun name stolen from Viz or some gobby prick at the pub. "Why do you need to see _more_? This room's full of specimens."

"You're not getting it, Dan?" Ned told him in that fucking aggravating rising intonation way that made everything he said sound like a question. "It's funny cos it's a swear, but it's also a name?"

"...No, I... I understand the concept. Just-"

"I'm gonna be Will U. Suckmanuts."

"That's... not even a decent attempt."

Jonatton, sprawled in an inflatable armchair looking bored and peeling the stickers off a Rubik's Cube, said, "Your overlord, Phil McCracken, says it is."

"Jesus," Dan muttered after a moment, then scowled at the dweezils he had to work with when they all looked at him expectantly for the second half of the pun to come crashing down. "That wasn't even... Ivan Itchinanus?" he read aloud from the sticky note Mudd just leant over and attached to the back of his hand, then it twigged as soon as the honking braying sniggering imbecilic laughter started from every side and he crumpled the note into a pea-sized ball, pinging it hard across the room even though it was too small a missile to be satisfying. "Fuck off, you're all fucking-"

"Dan's got an itching anus," Rufus interrupted happily, as if the other shitlords didn't get the joke they were laughing at and needed him to explain it to them, and Dan stormed out to the corner shop for a Stella and a Chomp before he was forced to commit mass murder, managing to take almost two blissfully quiet hours to do so.

"Roger Grooms is here for you?" Ned told him when he finally dragged himself back. Dan wished necrotising fasciitis on him with all the rage he could muster.

"Roger Grooms. Ha ha. Very funny. Maybe he'll take a break from the Grooms and Roger my Itchinanus instead, hey?"

Ned's sideways glance at Rufus made Dan wonder suddenly whether he'd made a huge mistake.

"Dan," Sasha said quietly. "This is Mr Grooms. He's here to talk to you about the community mural project on Hoxton Street."

"Hello," Dan said, but it came out as, "Fuck," instead.

* * *

**( 2002 )**

Jones kissed him first, he was pretty sure of that if nothing else, although really he thought he probably shouldn't trust much about what his mind had retained from that night. He thought he remembered lips and laughing, the scuff of stubble, some bubblegummy blue sort of taste, shards of crunched ice cubes, the dank smell of armpit sweat and chip shop curry, the grit and tickle of carpet dust in his nose when he half fell over after Jones let him go and ended up spreadeagled on the living room floor surrounded by fag ends and unwashed feet. Was the party still happening? He couldn't tell. There was still music, but there was always music.

Rubbery words seemed to expand in his mouth and pop like balloons, too sudden and too loud. "Did you kiss me?"

"You're drunk," Jones told him, leaning back against the peeling wallpaper with a bottle of that blue drink and laughing like he was high, except he wasn't. He put the bottle down and started stroking Dan's hair. For a minute it felt nice, sort of warm and sort of safe and far too sweet for an insomniac squatter with a turntable for a brain, then his hands started to pull until his fist was full of curls and Dan felt his face stretching backwards over his skull. "You'd look well weird with a ponytail."

"Then don't... don't. Jones."

"Don't what?"

"Don't. Let go." He lifted a hand as boneless and pathetic as an inflated washing up glove and tried to swat him away, but Jones said, "Alright," and kissed him again, so maybe what he really said was _don't let go_.

The rest was by turns hazier - he drank the blue thing, and the rest of the Jack, and too much of whatever Mental Mickey was mixing in the cracked bathtub - and as vivid as a flick knife in the grundle. Somewhere between the rise and fall of voices and the slamming of doors and shot glasses there was a hand on his prick and a hot mouth sucking his carotid pulse out through his skin. Vague memories of slobbering, pawing stupidly at zebra-striped bondage trousers as though his hands were mittens, the salt taste of snot when he aimed like a fucking prinkle and snogged Jones on the nose by mistake, then the slight crease Jones got between his eyebrows when he was frowning down at his hand and the limp lifeless thing lying in it like a dead worm, the way the frown almost ( _almost_ ) smoothed away when he looked Dan in the undoubtedly bloodshot eyes. "Aint gonna happen, is it?" he said, and patted him kindly on the shoulder as he wandered off to reclaim his decks from whichever scrote was playing the whole of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk.

He woke up the next afternoon with a stiffy even bigger than his mortified hangover, because Dan Ashcroft's life was one big long endless fucking punchline.

* * *

**( 2005 )**

He was in a better mood than usual that morning, despite the plaster casts on both legs and the savage itch he couldn't reach underneath, mainly because there was no way he was going to have to spend the day with the bibbles who started howling _Ashcrooooooft!_ at him through the intercom when he buzzed.

"Bye, idiots," he called. The grin splitting his face ached like his broken bones and weary muscles, all of him thrumming with disuse but strengthening by the minute. "Bye. If there's no lift I don't have to work here any more but you can't stop paying me. Bye. I'm going to the pub. Enjoy your plastic lives."

His sense of getting one over on them may or may not have been heightened by the appalling number of painkillers in his system, prescribed and otherwise. Whatever it was, it made wheeling himself away towards the dip in the kerb feel like a rushing rollercoaster, a sickening giddy thrill of speeding freedom that nothing and nobody could take away.

Except...

"Terms of the futuristic dune buggy wheelchair, Danbo," Jonatton called after him from the upstairs window, and Dan slowed, then stopped, then wished death upon his boss with all the ferocity of a thousand roaring suns. "Cripple's eye view of Hoxditch culture, etc?" An envelope containing a £5 advance fluttered down like a dying bird and landed open in the gutter - probably on purpose, so the idiots could all gather in the windows and place bets on whether he'd fall and break his face as he scrabbled for his fiver, as though his fucking miserable life were one of Barley's idiot games.

Days one to four were spent brooding and angrily masturbating in the shitty ground floor bedsit Claire had found for him to stay in until his legs were out of plaster. Day five, he blearily thought he'd better get the fucking article out of the way and maybe some sunlight and fags while he was at it, and rumbled himself along the main road to find somewhere to park and write that wasn't overrun by trendy fuckers on twatcycles.

Obviously that's when he saw the last fucking person on earth he wanted to be stuck with while he couldn't run away.

"Lieutenant Dan!" Nathan Barley yelled at him, massive shiteating grin on his massive punchable face.

"Go away." Dan's seething command was flat when it should have been sharp, but rage like that couldn't be moulded into a blade no matter how much Nathan Barley Dot Cock deserved one lodged in his pisshole.

"Nice wheels, Preacherman!"

"Go away."

"I mean it, well gas chamber!"

"You... what does that even _mean_?"

Shit, big mistake, now Barley thought they were having a conversation. Dan spun in his chair, had a brief moment of pride at his improving wheel work as he sailed off the kerb, then he got hit by a car.

* * *

**( 2007 )**

The argument about what he should do with his life went round and round in circles for what felt like hours, until he sneered one last devastating putdown and strode like a hero out of the restaurant.

Funnily enough, that's also how long it felt for the revolving door to spin full circle and spit him back out in front of Claire after he stumbled and missed his exit.

* * *

**( 2008 )**

One time there was a power cut and the sudden avalanche of silence woke him the way normal people were woken by a noise. Jones appeared in the doorway, his unmistakable profile silhouetted against the murky orange seeping through the house from the streetlamps outside. He was spinning a ratchet, a shitty pink and white plastic thing Dan bought him from the pound shop for Christmas - running out of meter money stopped him making music but it never stopped him making noise - and he said, "I'm bored, Dan."

Dan rubbed his eyes, digging his nicotined fingers deep so the sleep crumbs bit like glass, and said, "Alright, let's go out."

He dozed in the car, long legs cramped and bloodless at the knees from pressing against the dashboard, and woke up again somewhere in the countryside with the silver of dawn just beginning to lighten Jones' window. His own was still indigo and starlight, occasional shadows of sheep and faraway farmhouse windows, and he leaned his head against the cool glass and watched the darkness while beside him Jones' fingers tapped rackets on the steering wheel and gearstick in time with the mix tape that blared from the speakers loud enough to shake their bowels loose. _I don't know how you stand it_ , Claire always said, and Dan shrugged and tried to explain it was like white noise to him by now, except it wasn't. It was noise of every colour, a Pollock of sound.

"Where are we going?"

"Blackpool," Jones yelled back, "I wanna see the lights since we ain't got none," and Dan closed his eyes again and laughed into the darkness of his eyelids and the brilliance of the beats.

"It's four hours away, won't get there til mid-morning."

"Wanna make it Clacton instead?"

"I don't care." He was aware it was probably love, this gurgle in his stomach, though he wasn't sure whether it was because of everything or in spite of everything, and he didn't want to ruin it with words like he ruined everything else. He reached out, swiped the volume knob all the way to the right, wound down his window so the thud of music and the whip of wind filled the knackered old Mini, and Jones grinned at him sideways like some crooked-toothed Adonis in leopard print leggings. "I don't care, just drive."

~


End file.
